The supposed improvement would significantly raise the bar for entry-level discrete graphics, at 3x the performance of Ivy Bridge. In fact, it would make buying a laptop without discrete graphics a lot easier to stomach for gamers on a budget. I don't know if this report is too optimistic, but we shall soon find out what Intel has to say for itself regarding Haswell:

I just did some reading on this puppy - apparently this thing might STILL have SATA2 ports on the boards shipping at the time, madness :/I would love an excuse to upgrade but jeez, it doesn't sound like it'll bring much to the table.

AbRASiON wrote:I just did some reading on this puppy - apparently this thing might STILL have SATA2 ports on the boards shipping at the time, madness :/I would love an excuse to upgrade but jeez, it doesn't sound like it'll bring much to the table.

Well HDDs are still going to be viable storage for the foreseeable future; they're not bottle-necked by SATA2 yet.

AbRASiON wrote:I just did some reading on this puppy - apparently this thing might STILL have SATA2 ports on the boards shipping at the time, madness :/I would love an excuse to upgrade but jeez, it doesn't sound like it'll bring much to the table.

According the rumors I've seen the Z87 chipset will include 6 SATA III ports so if there are a couple of SATA II ports hanging off the board I'm not thinking it will be a real problem. I think DeadOfKnight called it when he said that mechanical HDDs and optical drives won't care about SATA, and if you are using more than 6 SSDs you probably want some sort of crazy dedicated controller card anyway.

Good link! Anand needs to work on indexing the podcasts ala TR so that its easier to find what you are interested in. Since this is his first podcast he is probably still on the learning curve.Edit: go to about 25:30 in the podcast for the part that DeadOfKnight referenced.

DeadOfKnight wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:This thing is going to be all sorts of fast.

I was listening to the first podcast on AnandTech and Anand let slip that he's quite positive Haswell uses the better thermal interface from before Ivy Bridge.

Airmantharp wrote:I'm going to ask this in general here: do any of you know if people are having good luck with popping the IHS off of Ivy CPUs and replacing the TIM for better overclocking?

I don't know about "luck" but it is possible if you have no problem with the very real possibility that you'll end up with a dead chip that won't be replaced under warranty due to tampering. See here for some results: http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/colu ... 32119.html

Thanks for the link- it looks like the replaced TIM could take 15 to 20 degrees off of the core temperature, which brings it in line with what we saw from Sandy. Still a little hotter, but much more manageable!

Any word on what SKUs will be in the inial release? I'd love to nab a power-sipping i3 Haswell with the better graphics for my HTPC so that I can also do a bit of light iGPU gaming with it. But, if history is any indicator, those won't come out until ~6 months after the initial release.

DPete27 wrote:Any word on what SKUs will be in the inial release? I'd love to nab a power-sipping i3 Haswell with the better graphics for my HTPC so that I can also do a bit of light iGPU gaming with it. But, if history is any indicator, those won't come out until ~6 months after the initial release.

Thanks for the link. My impressions: A lot of stuff we already knew, or could infer from past statements (eg, the two new ports were necessary to not bottleneck FMA). But the L1 and L2 cache improvements are significant, and pretty remarkable considering how much optimization had already gone into them. That benefits everything without requiring code changes (and incidentally should aid TSX, since that is extremely cache-dependent). Most of the juicy details on the genuinely new stuff are waiting on the later presentations, however.

The GT3 looks like the IGP to have, if you're going to have an IGP. AFAIK only the mobile parts will offer it, but that should raise the bar for graphics especially as higher-res screens become more common. Interesting there's hw for image stabilization; that looks to be the first tablet-and-below dedicated feature.

Low power usage is certainly the theme. If only the paranoid survive, then obviously ARM is the threat these days.

Also, Broadwell looks to be a bigger change in some ways than Haswell is, at least on the architectural (rather than microarchitectural) level. That's something of a departure from the past tick-tock discipline.

From all indications Intel wants to leave AMD alive to service the budget segment, so it doesn't have to. Of course even their best intentions may be no match for AMD's stumbles out of upper-storey windows or into traffic.

Assuming Intel can get Haswell out on time it looks like a winner. Getting that kind of CPU+GPU performance out of 7.5 watts (shown in the Unigine demo) is not an easy accomplishment by any stretch. I will give the GPU win to the GT3 parts in Ultrabooks and full-size mobiles over Trinity (pretty clear) and Ultrabooks will likely still have a performance lead over whatever equivalent Kaveri chips AMD can come up with. In the full-wattage (35 watt) category Kaveri may pull ahead of the 25-35 watt GT3 Haswells.

The good news for AMD: Intel is so laser-focused on mobile parts that desktop Trinity will still beat the weaker GT2 desktop Haswell parts. Of course, on the CPU side AMD has absolutely no answer for Intel, and I'm including Steamroller in that assessment.

The bad news for AMD: The days of being able to laugh at Intel's IGPs are quickly coming to an end, and Intel is making the biggest improvements in mobile where the IGP also makes the most sense.

BTW, you can download the slides for the IDF presentations (once they've been actually been presented) directly from Intel. ARCS001 is the afternoon Haswell μarch presentation, for example.

On another note: TR is going to have fun benchmarking TSX. At least initially it will just be the HLE form, which also has the virtue of allowing the same code-path to run on Haswell and earlier CPUs, but they'll have to find software that is both sufficiently multithreaded (with some contention for shared data) and recompiled with the HLE hints.